LOVERRO: The Nationals sale is stalled and suddenly the Lerners don’t sound much like sellers

When the Washington Nationals announced a new multi-year contract extension for general manager Mike Rizzo, team owner Mark Lerner included this statement in the press release:

“We are once again hard at work to build a championship contender in D.C. We now believe we have the beginnings of a roster filled with promising young players and exciting prospects at nearly every position. While we once talked about winning World Series rings for our baseball-loving fathers, Mike’s family and ours now look forward to winning even more rings for our children and grandchildren — and, of course, for every other Nationals-loving fan and family everywhere. We are excited about our future.”

Does that sound like a man who wants to sell his baseball team? Children and grandchildren? I don’t think so.

In a April 2022 Washington Post story, Mark Lerner announced his family was looking into selling the Nationals, the team they purchased from Major League Baseball for $450 million in 2005. “This is an exploratory process, so there is no set timetable or expectation of a specific outcome,” Lerner said in a statement.

The exploration resulted in a specific outcome of finding a black hole if they thought there would be a line of bidders down South Capitol Street willing to pay billions for their baseball team.

The black hole was MASN — their television captor.

Since that April “exploration process,” there has been little from the Lerners about what how that process was proceeding, save for a Washington Post report that Wizards and Capitals owner Transparent Ted Leonsis had a group that offered more than $2 billion.

I suspect the Lerners wanted significantly more than $2 billion — particularly after the valuations of the sale of minority pieces of the Texas Rangers and Philadelphia Phillies. The Rangers’ value rose to $3 billion with the sale of 10% of the team in May, while the Phillies sold a 16.25% share of their club in June that resulted in their franchise value being set at $2.8 billion.

The Lerners saw those numbers and likely raised their own expectations. But neither of those team’s television rights were held hostage by another team.

If it wasn’t apparent before the sale — it should have been — it became clear after the exploration started that the tangled MASN agreement and the fight for revenue between the Baltimore Orioles (which is essentially MASN, both primarily owned by the Angelos family) and the Nationals that the Washington team’s value was diminished by the MASN deal.

Even with the news in June that the two sides, after a bitter, protracted legal battle, reached an agreement over what the Nationals were due for their television rights from 2012 to 2016, the amount to be paid is still in negotiations — and there is still the figure from 2017 to 2022 to be fought over. None of that will be easy.

That’s part of the problem. You have two sides in the Angelos and the Lerners that make every business deal difficult. I wrote when the news broke that the team was for sale, “You want to buy a box of paper clips from the Lerners? Good luck with that. You want to buy a baseball team from the Lerners? That would be sort of like buying the box of paper clips — only many times worse.”

The state of Maryland is trying to reach a new Camden Yards lease agreement with John Angelos, the son of Peter Angelos, who has been incapacitated for several years. That lease runs out at the end of the year, and those negotiations have been embarrassing to all involved.

I have written for several years that the Nationals sale won’t happen until the Orioles are sold, which, according to sources, will happen once Peter Angelos, 94, passes away. It is spelled out in his will, sources have told me. There are bidders waiting for the Orioles to be put on the market — possibly including Transparent Ted, whose group, according to Bloomberg, would be interested in purchasing the Baltimore franchise if it does become available.

Any such sale of the Orioles would not likely be approved by Major League Baseball unless the whole MASN agreement was dissolved, with each team then free to determine their own television rights. Television rights are very important to Transparent Ted, who now owns NBC Sports Washington and desperately needs programming.

As far as we know, Transparent Ted was the only one who had made a legitimate offer to the Lerners.

If there is no sale, I doubt there will be many tears shed. The Lerners are very flawed owners, but I’m not sure Transparent Ted would be much better. He has been a disaster as Wizards owner. He refused to pay his 2018 Capitals Stanley Cup winning coach enough to keep Barry Trotz from leaving. I don’t think the Lerners are even that foolish.

So, with manager Dave Martinez and now Mike Rizzo locked up with new contracts, it appears Mark Lerner is going to see this rebuild of the Nationals through.

“These guys are into every step of the rebuild, particularly Mark Lerner,” Rizzo said in a zoom call to discuss his new deal. “They are all in. They want to win.”

With an $80 million payroll this year — hardly what the front office believed was “all in” — you could have fooled me. The team may have exceeded expectations on the field, but I’m not sure you want a baseball franchise in the seventh-largest media market in the country referred to as “scrappy.”

I think their grandchildren deserve better.

⦁ You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.